seeingthinkingfeelingwonderingaboutstuff

Seeing is an odd kind of exchange – one between the outside and inside world – information is reflected onto the retina at the back of the eyeball. That information is processed by the brain, which tells me what/how to see.Looking at people – catching their eye. What takes place in such an exchange, what are we reading? Windows to the soul? Apparently. There is such a sense of permeability between me and the outside world through my eyes. I can feel that I am being revealed – that more can be seen of me than I am deliberately revealing when someone looks into my eyes. What takes place? What little shifts of physiology, what chemical processes are ignited in those complex looking, looking away moments we have with people, the flirtation, the fear, the questioning, the searching, the closing off, the opening up.Is there a sensation of being watched?How do I locate the actual sensation of seeing; of looking at things? The muscular activity of the eyes as well as the sensation that my looking produces in my body.Whether I focus – aim my sight at something and apply it to it’s surfaces, it’s contrasts or whether I allow my eyes simply to drink the world in. Sitting on a train and looking out of the window with defocused eyes and thinking about work or life, or really trying to see details – letting my eyes be passengers in my head passively taking in visual information, or allowing the eyes to latch onto things – to see more.Whether seeing becomes the sighttrack to my thoughts – the background, coloured by my thinking, or whether what I’m seeing is the main event with my thoughts taking a ride on the visual information. So much projection takes place in my mind – I don’t just see – I think, I feel things, have emotional responses to what I see and through these responses, I change what I see. When I’m listening to a personal stereo, the music becomes the soundtrack to my film.Visual exchange. What is coming in and what is being projected out? What is beautiful? What is ugly? These things such a visual concepts in so many ways. Projection – through our eyes/minds, we project ourselves onto the planet, we see things and make them manifest. Buildings, actions, gardens, landscapes, actions.The world has been made this way; each last manifestation impacting on the next through the lens of our eyes and our minds/emotions – we see something, are influenced by it and then make the next thing based on our response to it.Our eyes lead a process of constantly reshaping what we see. This happens both physically and in our imaginations, we make judgements about the things we see and, in our eyes, that is what they become; a person/action/object is good/beautiful/bad/ugly. It’s as if our minds though our eyes have projected all the people made things into the world – painting reality upon the world as our eyes project our ideas onto it.What don’t we notice. We are so stubborn in our way of seeing in our way of constructing reality – Because this is how we think it is, this is how we see it and therefore, this is how it is.I guess that art can give a voice to some of the less obvious, less visible, or insistent voices. The in between places, the not sure’s, the possibility that this only one reality and that others exist to be seen as we learn to bring our attention to them.Art can attempt to make a space for quieter voices – to be an advocate for the things we don’t notice or give value to.There is nothing to say that the louder voice is the true one.The big spider is not the killer, but the small one, it’s not the disfiguring skin rash that kills, but the invisible virus, born on the air we breath, and the cure often as invisible as the virus.Bringing our attention to the act of seeing, of perception is a way to perceive more, a way to understand my own role in the way things appear to me. A way perhaps to see what part of what I see is about my perception of it rather than what it actually is.